Discussion of the Square Meal Diet

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How baffling standard medical practice is!

One would think that standard medical practice would be to treat diabetics with high dose thiamine in divided doses throughout the day. It is not.

Why would a sensible person think this?

Bodily pools of thiamine are small, about 30 mg in a normal person.

The small bodily pools of thiamine are regulated primarily at the level of proper kidney reabsorption. Hence poor reabsorption can lead to serious deficiencies.

The bodily turnover of thiamine is rapid, half-life about 15 days in a normal person.

Thiamine is heat-labile – do not expect to meet nutritional needs from cooked and cooked-and-reheated foods

Less than half of Americans take supplements, even fewer thiamine supplements.

Diabetics suffer pretty extreme diuresis – most have 3 diuretics: caffeine, a diuretic for high blood pressure, and of course glucose diuresis.

Diabetics have poorer than average kidney function and it declines throughout their condition. In particular kidney reabsorption of thiamine tends to be poor.

As a consequence of #6 and #7, diabetics urinate out more thiamine than the rest of us. This also implies that the half-life of thiamine in diabetics is less than the average of about 15 days.

As a consequence of #2 and #8, diabetics tend to have thiamine deficiencies, potentially severe.

Diabetes has many harmful consequences. Two of them are neuropathy and nephropathy, and doctors wrongly blame these solely on diabetes, while in fact those two are also consequences of thiamine deficiency, even in the absence of diabetes. While few are cured of diabetes by the current procedures of medical management of the condition, thiamine deficiency is treatable, and if corrected, might shift the odds in favor of avoiding painful neuropathy and harmful nephropathy. The last thing a diabetic needs is poorer kidney function.

But then treatment with thiamine is not part of standard medical management of the diabetic condition.

Go figure, based on the above.

Thiamine deficiency is but one of many diabetics suffer. Zinc deficiency is another. There are doubtless many more. All treatable, even if their diabetes is not – which I do not believe. Reversal of the 6 deficiencies that drive degenerative disease would likely cure most diabetics, but then doctors are not focused on the drivers, the deficiencies, but on the aggravators, the excesses so many diabetics indulge in.